13k. year old site found on idaho river.

Archeologists have uncover a cach of stone points at a site along an Idaho river.

On a remote forest riverbank in northern Idaho, archaeologists have uncovered evidence of human occupation going back more than 13,500 years, adding to the signs of an increasingly ancient human presence in the Northwest, and fueling the debate about how the region’s earliest settlers got there.

The oldest evidence, found in test pits dug along the North Fork of the Clearwater River, includes a blade-like tool fashioned from a rock cobble and dozens of flakes left over from the tool-making process, known as debitage.

It appears as though this is a western stemmed tradition site

Western Stemmed Tradition.

The oldest of them dating to just over 11,000 years ago, these points are the signature of a culture whose traces have been found throughout the Great Basin and the Northwest.

Western Stemmed points discovered elsewhere have been dated to a similar range as the Idaho finds, and in some cases even earlier, including Oregon’s Paisley Caves, where samples have been dated, somewhat controversially, to more than 14,000 years old.

[Read about the latest research from Paisley Caves: "Ancient Feces From Oregon Cave Aren’t Human, Study Says, Adding to Debate on First Americans"]
Taken together, the range of artifacts found at the Idaho site, known as Kelly Forks, suggests long and regular use by ancient hunter-gatherers, primarily for making tools and processing game, according to Laura Longstaff of the University of Idaho, who reported her team’s findings at the annual meeting of the Montana Archaeological Society.

“There is enough material associated with the earliest dates to get an idea of the animals they hunted, tools they were making, stone they used at 13,000 years ago,” she said in an interview.

“And just having anything associated with these dates is enough to get excited about.”

Chemical analysis of the flake tool revealed it to have traces of proteins associated with rabbit flesh, she added, “so that means that people were using rabbit as a resource during the earliest occupation we encountered at the site, which is really cool.”

But the more recent, 11,000-year-old points found at Kelly Forks are equally significant, she said, because they add important new data to the mounting evidence of the Western Stemmed Tradition in the Northwest.

They may also shed light on the Tradition’s proximity, if any, to the Clovis, whose own unique tools found throughout North America suggest they were the first widespread culture on the continent.

westerndigs.org...

a reply to: punkinworks10

Here you go.

westerndigs.org...

From the link:

“The special thing is that the volume of artifacts indicates that many different people were stopping there at different times of the year and maybe even just a few days apart.

“I think the region was an active place where people were constantly coming and going on their way to collect the next available resource, or on their way home for the winter.”


ETA: Sorry, thought you were done XD

a reply to: JohnTheSmith
It'd all good
I'm posting from my mobile and it has a sketchy text editor that refreshes every time I open a new window, so I have to post what I've got on the clipboard immediately or I lose it, it's such a pain.

I'm at lunch right now so I've just skimmed over the article, but it's very interesting, given that the western stemmed tradition predates clovis by a couple thousand years.
IMO, the western stemmed tradition represents actual Asiatic migrants that worked their way up the river drainages of the north west then back down into California and the great basin, and were the ancestors of some of the tribes of the west.

a reply to: punkinworks10

There is exposed basalt near all volcanos in the region that the favorite material for arrowheads.
There are several YTers that show the complete process and are quite experts at doing the samples in your OP.
I am mobile today too...so no in-bed.

a reply to: Granite
There are some excellent modern flintknappers,
Fine grained basalt is a good stone,, but there are even better stones, and it's clear that Clovis utilized stones from hundreds off miles away.
In fact in the mythology of one of the central sierra tribes, the locations for different types of stone and what tool they are best for is related in the tale.
That distance has been used to make the point that these early people were extremely mobile. But it really looks like their was some sort I'd rudimentary trade network, not in the sense that we look at trade networks, but as different groups came across each other they may have exchanged goods.

The carrier Indians of Anaheim |Lake BC traded volcanic rock from BC down to florida long ago...maybe they will find some of their obsidian too....